America’s founding freedoms were written to exclude Black, female, and lower-class subjects.

Evidence

Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he silenced women. … White “children and Apprentices were disobedient” as a result of “our struggle,” Adams said the delegates had been told. “Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Now she had informed him that women were also “discontented.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Adams’ catalogue of ‘disobedient children, insolent Negroes’ mirrors the moral-panic-pattern structure the reader tracked in other books: elites reading subordinate groups’ self-assertion as disorder. — connects to: Americans glorified liberty radiating outward more than receiving the oppressed; Freedom of association was defined negatively as the right to exclude, not positively — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 373; Virginia’s ‘natural rights’ clause was drafted to exclude enslaved Africans. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 199